Authors: William Lashner
“And now he’s in Philly.”
“Did I say that?”
“Pretty much. You got an address?”
“Something someplace, I don’t know. He stopped calling af
ter Mom died, but he sends me a card every year on the anniversary of her death.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And then I send him a check.”
“I bet you do. Can you get that address for me?”
“Why?”
“Maybe your brother won the lottery and I’m trying to find him.”
There was a chuckle. “That loser?”
“Or maybe I might just head over to the county courthouse and check out your mother’s will. See if half this house belongs to Terrence. We can have the sheriff sell the thing right from under you, split the proceeds. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“An only child,” I said, “and suddenly damn glad for it. Let’s go get that address, shall we?”
The address Frankie Tipton gave me was about 250 miles north of Ashland, Virginia, in a ragged part of industrial Philadelphia called Kensington. I could have given the address to the police, left it to them to roust Terry and ask him the questions, but the task would then have ended in Sims’s hands, and I held no confidence that he wouldn’t scare off Terry like he’d scared off Jamison. Whatever angle Sims was pursuing, it wasn’t designed to be beneficial to my health. So no, this I would have to do myself. I figured I’d slip into the house, grab hold of Terry, shake out the truth, and bring him and it to my pal Detective McDeiss, along with any evidence I could grab. But as soon as I got a gander of the row house that sat at the address, I revised my plan.
“Squatters,” said Antoine from the driver’s seat of his Camaro.
We had made the drive in a straight shot, and now, in the
ill-lit darkness of Kensington, we could see a swarm gathered on the front stoop of the house as we passed it slowly.
“Does that mean it’s abandoned?” I said.
“It mean anything, mon,” said Antoine. “Maybe the owner’s renting space cheap for a few dollar here and there. Or maybe he being generous, who knows? But I can tell you just by looking, there be a crowd inside.”
“Park here,” I said.
“What you doing, bo?” said Derek.
“I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
“How?”
“I’ve got a source.”
About fifty yards down from the house, on the opposite side of the street, an old man sat flat-footed in a lawn chair set up on the sidewalk. He wasn’t smoking a cigar or drinking a beer or discussing the state of the union. He was simply sitting, still as the earth, as if he had been planted in that very spot a century ago and grew up and old with the neighborhood, sitting there, losing teeth as the block lost buildings, letting time wash over him. The perfect spy. In Philadelphia there’s one on every corner. I knelt down beside him. He didn’t turn his head a degree.
“You see that house over there?” I said. “The one with all the folks milling about in front?”
“I see it.”
“You know who lives there?”
“A bunch of fools.”
“You know their names?”
“Don’t want to know their names.”
“Who owns it, do you know that?”
“The king of fools.”
“A white guy, dark hair, about my age?”
“He don’t dress as good.”
“You like the way I’m dressed?”
“Except for that tie.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
“And the shoes ain’t nothing to write home about neither.”
“What are all these other people doing there at that house?”
“They do errands, keep intruders out. But mostly he lets them stay to up and rile the block.”
“Tough crowd?”
“They too drugged out to be tough. Back in the day, I would have cleared them out myself with but a baseball bat.”
“I bet you would have. Ever see a woman show up, dark hair, well dressed?”
“Pretty?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I seen her. Seeing her always cheered up my day.”
“How often she show up?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“Have you seen her in the last couple of days?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
“You see anyone peculiar show up instead of her?”
“You mean other than you?”
“Yes, other than me.”
“Bow tie.”
“You don’t say.”
“Little man, near bald, in a black Volvo.”
“When?”
“Couple times.”
“How long you been sitting out here?”
“How long you been breathing?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Good luck to you, young man.”
“Yeah,” I said. I stood up, patted the old man on the shoulder, went back to the Camaro, where Derek and Antoine leaned against the hood, their arms crossed.
“What’s the word, bo?” said Derek.
I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like the crowd of
squatters we’d have to wade through to get inside, I didn’t trust that things wouldn’t spiral way out of control. But then I didn’t like the crowd behind me either, Trocek and Swift and Sims and Hanratty, a vicious gang of cutthroats and cops that all seemed to be aiming their malevolence at me.
“The word is,” I said, “that we’re going in.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Antoine.
I took the lead, Antoine and Derek walking on either side of me. I was like a Piper Cub with an undersize fighter plane off one wing and a Boeing 757 off the other. On the porch of the house, five or six of the squatters were lounging on a bench or on the stoop, eyeing us suspiciously as we made our approach. Let’s just say the welcome mat wasn’t being cleaned and pressed for our visit.
“What you want here?” said a woman sitting closest to the door. She had short hair and a wide jaw, and her arms were crossed.
“We came to see the owner,” I said.
“You from the city?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re not here about them back taxes? He been getting letters.”
“No, we’re not from the city.”
“You cops, then?”
“Not that either,” I said. “I’m simply a friend of a friend. And these are my friends. We came to say hello.”
“In a suit?”
“I like to play it formal. My name’s Victor Carl.”
“I got to check with Romeo afore I let you in.”
“Romeo, huh? Is that what he’s calling himself? That’s almost sweet. Well, then, by all means check with Romeo. Tell him Victor Carl is here to see him. I’m sure Romeo will think it’s time we met at last.”
The woman eyed us for a moment longer and then pushed
herself off of the bench, pulled open the screen door, and slipped into the house. A moment later she came back through the doorway, the screen door slamming behind her.
“Romeo’ll be out in a minute,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you should wait on that,” she said before sitting down again.
When the screen door opened once more, standing there wasn’t a dissolute drug addict with curly dark locks and a pout as I expected. Instead it was a giant of a man, with no neck and a shirt that hung over his belly like a curtain. A man to make Antoine look small.
“Where’s Romeo?” I said.
“I’m Romeo,” said the man, his voice deep enough to send wild dogs scurrying.
“You got to be kidding,” I said.
“Time to go,” said Romeo.
“I’m here to see Terry,” I said.
“That too bad,” said Romeo, “’cause Terry told me he don’t want to see no one.”
“But he’ll want to see Victor here,” said Derek. “We’ve traveled five hundred miles to find him. Why don’t you let us in there, Romeo? We’re just a friendly little crew. No reason to make a fuss about this.”
“There isn’t going to be no fuss,” said Romeo.
“You right about that,” said Antoine, taking a step forward.
“Antoine?” said Romeo, squinting down at him.
“Hey there, Bradley,” said Antoine. “You look like you eating at least.”
“You not starving yourself neither.”
“What the hell are you doing here, bwoy? Last time I saw you, there was work in Boston you were headed to.”
“It didn’t pan out.”
“So now you hanging out here with this motley bunch.”
Romeo shrugged. “It’s a place.”
“This is step back, bruddah.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“Well, bwoy, that’s just sad, that is. Now we’re going inside to talk to this man. And, Bradley, you don’t want to be getting in our way.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Antoine.”
“It’s not me you should be fearing, bwoy. Step aside, or I’ll tell your muddah what you’re up to, and she’ll tell Earl, and then Earl, he will lick you for sure.”
“Not from where he is.”
“Stop playing the fool, mon. You think he can’t reach out from lockup to take care of his likkle bruddah?”
Romeo stared at Antoine for a moment, licked his lips, and then stepped back, keeping the screen door open.
“Up the stairs,” he said, “room at the back.”
“You done right, bwoy,” said Antoine, brushing past Romeo to step inside the house. Derek and I glanced at each other nervously and then quickly followed.
The inside of the house was dark, filthy, a fetid swamp covered with a foul mist of smoke and despair. The living room, if it could still be called that, was crowded with mattresses and sleeping bags and dazed humans lounging lethargically as a large-screen television flickered. It smelled like feces and sweat, laced with marihuana. Two dogs yapped at us and snarled before someone threw a shoe. I started itching just being in there. On the far side of the room was a narrow staircase. We picked our way past the mattresses and sleeping bags. A hand grabbed at my ankle, and I kicked it off.
A few ghosts, languid and vacant, drifted down the stairs. As we rose past them, the sounds of a rock ’n’ roll band and a plaintive male voice climbed above the noise of the television. A whining, complaining voice wailing about bitter pills and love and loss.
On the second floor, there were four doors closed, the sounds of slow shuffling movement coming from within one, from another a groaning. And then the music, sad and angry and wistful all at once coming from the rear room, the front man not really singing, more howling out in desperation. Follow the voice, I figured.
A girl was sitting on the floor in front of the door, picking at a thumbnail.
“Terry in there?” I said.
She looked up at me, a pretty girl, young and thin, her face a terrifying blank.
“Let’s go, sister,” said Antoine, putting out his big mitt.
She placed her tiny hand in his and stood up slowly, swaying once before she moved away from the door.
I gave her a long look and then said to Antoine, “Wait out here. Make sure we’re not disturbed.”
“Not a problem, mon.”
I turned to Derek, nodded once, and pushed the door open. A waft of sickeningly sweet smoke tumbled out of the doorway along with the earsplitting music.
Together we pressed inside.
We entered a room so out of place in the middle of that crack house that my breath caught in my chest.
It was like a gentleman’s room from centuries past, or a whore’s boudoir, with blood-red curtains and gold flocked wallpaper. There was a huge, ornate bed in the middle of the bare floor, its carved posts reaching almost to the ceiling, its velvet bedspread mussed, its brown paisley pillows awry. The windows were closed, the curtains drawn, the room ill lit and smoky. In the corner sat a broken guitar, the neck detached from its body.
A cone of light fell from a lamp to illuminate a small desk set against one of the walls, where a man, with his back to us, was bent over, writing, writing away, scribbling with a great urgency, as if the true meaning of the world had just been passed to him in a whisper. He was wearing a jacket, jeans, no shoes, as the music poured out around him. Beside him on the desk was an ashtray with the stub of a dead joint perched on its edge.
I softly closed the door behind Derek and me, stepped over to the stereo. The band’s front man was now raging in compressed anger, a soul-shattering blast of teenage angst. In the middle of the howl, I punched the power button. The music died.
“Romeo,” the man at the desk called out sleepily, dreamily, even as he kept with his scribbling.
“Romeo’s busy,” I said.
Without moving his body, he tilted his head and held it for a moment, then turned around. He had a pale, handsome face, so classical in its features it was like a painted Greek statue come to life, cleft chin, thick pouting lips, cheeks smooth as alabaster, their highlights red as rouge. His curly black hair fell carelessly across his forehead, so perfectly carelessly that you could tell it wasn’t careless at all. I would have expected a shock of surprise on that strange mask of a face, but there was none. It was as if nothing could surprise its owner.
“Ah, so it’s you,” he said leisurely, through a blurry smile. “I wondered when you’d come.”
“And here I am,” I said.
“What’s the matter? Didn’t you find the music soothing?”
“More like a pick in the eye,” I said.
Terrence Tipton’s own eyes, red rimmed and blue irised, squinted in stoned amusement. But it wasn’t his eyes that drew my attention, it was his chest. He was wearing a suit coat but no shirt, and his chest was a gory thing, pustuled with welts and boils, striped with scars.
“Maybe you could come back later,” he said. “I’m working.”
“On what? A suicide note?”
“No, but keep hoping. Poetry. I dabble. ‘Such is the refuge of our youth and age.’”
“Sorry to interrupt your great work, but we need to talk.”
“Do we?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How did you find me? Julia?”
“Your brother.”
“My dear brother,” he said. “I should have guessed. Franklin never could keep a confidence.” He reached for the stub of the joint in the ashtray, stared at it for a moment, offered it up to me.
“No,” I said.
“So you’re like that, are you?”
“Yeah, I’m like that.”
“Is that what Julia sees in you? The utter straightness, the complete lack of any coil in your spine? I suppose it’s a nice counterpoint to my own.”
He popped the roach into his mouth and swallowed it. Then he leaned over, opened one of the desk drawers, pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. He flicked the lighter to life, took the page he’d been scribbling on and set it on fire. As it burned down, he lit his cigarette on the flame, before dropping the burning page onto the floor. As the paper flamed out among the charred remains of scores of other pages, he took a deep drag from the cigarette. He leaned his elbow on the desk, propped his head languidly on his hand, exhaled a plume of smoke.
“I guess it wasn’t much of a poem,” I said.
“I burn them all,” he said, looking down at the smoldering paper. “‘The dying embers of an altar-place where had been heap’d a mass of holy things.’” He lifted his head to stare at me with lidded eyes. “So, Victor, I suppose you’re here to thank me.”
“Why the hell would I thank you?” I said.
“Because now your love has a chance.”
“You killed Wren Denniston for me, is that your story?”
“I wouldn’t cross the street for you. But for my Julia, who ‘walks in beauty like the night,’ I would do anything.”
“Including murder?”
“Especially murder. But true love demands nothing less, don’t you think?” He pushed himself out of his chair and began to walk slowly toward the bed. He had a pronounced limp, and I
noticed only then that his right foot was badly swollen. “I’m not talking lust here, Victor, though I have nothing against lust per se. I’m talking love, the kind that bites into your bones and never lets go. The kind that grows up with you, that grows old with you, that stands the test of your aging because time fails to blunt its sharpest edge.”
“And that’s the way you feel about Julia?”
“No, Victor, that’s the way you feel about Julia.”
I stared at him without responding. He sat on the edge of the bed, winced as he lifted his purpled foot onto the dark maroon bedcover, and then leaned back dreamily on a mound of paisley pillows.
“It is over for me,” he said. “‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care, the exalted portion of the pain and power of love.’”
“Who is that you keep annoyingly quoting? Shakespeare?”
“Byron.”
“Byron, huh?” I looked around at the extravagant room, the burned poetry. “Wasn’t he a self-dramatizing fop who screwed other men’s wives, wrote scads of overwrought romantic verse, and had wanton sex with his sister?”
He took a long drag from his cigarette, exhaled, raised an eyebrow. “Half sister,” he said. “Do you like my room?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Julia did it. She is always bringing me something, fixing the place up, trying to make me comfortable.”
“Trying to make you something, all right.”
“This fits her image of me.”
“Was this ever you?”
“No. Even when we were young, she had me wrong. I suppose that’s the true nature of love. I only play the part these days because it makes her happy. But now, with the ogreish Wren Denniston off to ‘the vanished hero’s lofty mound,’ there is nothing to stop Julia from finding her happiness with you.”
“Except you,” I said.
“Well, yes, true, there’s always me. But I don’t take up much space.”
I pulled a chair next to his bedside and sat down. I now had a clearer view of his ravaged body, and it was a brutal sight. Yes, his face was smooth and perfect—Dorian Gray came to mind—but it was clear from his chest and foot that he was being devoured by some virulent disease, something that infected him blood and bone. Above the tobacco smoke, I picked up a faint whiff of rot.
“What’s with your foot?” I said.
“It’s nothing. I stubbed my toe on something.”
“It smells bad. Like it’s gangrenous. You need to get out of this sepulcher and get it looked at.”
“I don’t want it looked at. ‘The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone.’”
“Stop acting like an idiot. Do you have a doctor?”
“Do I look like I have a doctor? I subscribe to the Doris Day health plan. What will be will be.”
“Let me get you out of here. The emergency room at Temple is not too far.”
“Is that why you came? To save me?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m willing to do that in addition.”
“Who is he?” he said, indicating Derek.
“My investigator.”
“He doesn’t say much.”
“Miracles happen. But he helped me find you, and now he’s here to listen to your confession.”
“Is that what I’m going to do? Confess?”
“That’s right. You’re going to tell us everything. How you showed up at the Denniston house. How you got hold of the gun. How you shot Julia’s husband in the head. And then we’re going to the emergency room.”
“You sound so sure of yourself. Is your investigator going to beat the truth out of me?”
“He won’t have to.”
“Going to ply me with drugs? Please say yes.”
“You’re floating already.”
“No more drugs?”
“No.”
“Pity. But then how do you intend to get me to talk?”
“I’m going to wait,” I said. “You want to tell me. You’re so proud of yourself you can’t help but tell me.”
He laughed. Then he snubbed dead his butt, opened the drawer of his bed table, pulled out a full joint, licked it, lighted it. He sat on that bed, leaned forward to prod his bad foot with a finger, leaned back, stared at me while he sucked in and held the smoke.
I watched him in silence.
It had been an astonishing performance, Terrence Tipton’s little show, with its burning poems and slurred voice and incessant quotations from a long-dead libertine, but that’s all it was, a show. It hadn’t taken me more than a moment to realize he was a dramatic little snit, still on the stage all these years after his vomitous failure as Romeo, still playing the melancholy young man brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past, still waiting for the spotlight to come his way and give him another chance.
And now here I was, at last, his opportunity.
So I wasn’t worried that he was apparently turning me down. I stayed quiet, and I waited. He wasn’t made for Beckett and his cold silences, no. He was made for Shakespeare and all that ripe verbal excess, for Byron’s fatal romanticism. He would soon take his place behind the footlights and begin his grand soliloquy. He couldn’t help himself.
I waited, and I waited some more. But I didn’t have to wait too long.